Liz Cheney’s Martyrdom, Kanye West’s Mar-a-Lago Dinner, Herschel Walker on Werewolves, and more

From the State of the Union election to the midterm elections, Vox’s political team has named many political winners and losers throughout 2022.

Now that 2018 is nearly over, we’ve taken a moment to single out some of the most notable achievements by current civil servants and would-be civil servants, and highlight some of their biggest blunders and failures. Here are the best, worst, and weirdest political moments and phenomena of the year.

worst dinner ever

One of the latest innovations in holiday celebrations is “Friendsgiving.” This is what millennials celebrate with family before the holidays with a Thanksgiving-style dinner with friends. The day before Thanksgiving, former President Donald Trump attended the following event at his private club, Marrhi Lago, Florida. Enjoyed a Thanksgiving-style dinner with two notable anti-Semites, rapper Kanye West and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

The meal was apparently good enough that West had a second helping of stuffing, but it generated a lot of grim headlines for Trump to digest. It was just a few weeks after disappointing results And shortly after he announced his third presidential run, he gave a snarky speech at Mar-a-Lago. News that the dinner was leaked only made things worse for Trump.

The former president was vague for days about dining with the two, but he couldn’t blame them (he even denied knowing who Fuentes was). . During that time, West and Fuentes gained attention, and then went on tour together in the alt-right media, where West repeatedly praised Adolf his Hitler.

most deliberate political martyrdom

Liz Cheney has set her political career on fire this year and never seemed to turn a blind eye. Wyoming Republicans became the face of the Commission on January 6, burning every last bridge to the Republican Party. After Jan. 6, Cheney continued to vehemently oppose Trump, which ultimately led to her being removed from office as the third-ranked Republican in the House, and her decision to join the committee saw her rise to power within the House Republican Congress. became a de facto pariah. Cheney didn’t care. She lost her primary in a landslide without even actually trying to win.

Instead, she became a guided missile, aimed directly at Donald Trump and the MAGA branch of the Republican Party. She had no problem getting Temple down on her head, as long as it also brought down Trump and his followers.

Cheney will never be completely irrelevant in American politics. Her last name, her former status as the House Republican Third Party, and her transformation into the Republican party’s most ardent Trump opponent since Jan. 6 vouch for that. But unless Sunday’s show dressing room is recognized as a state by Congress, her electoral career will be over for the time being.

worst political speech

There were many reasons why Hershel Walker lost the Senate race this year to incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock. Critics can point to the fact that whereas Warnock ran a good campaign, he ran a flawed one. Scandals could also be pointed out.In addition to what he chronicled in his memoir describing his struggle with mental illness, there were also new allegations of domestic violence.

Compared to these, his eloquence was not his biggest problem. But Walker summed up all of his political agenda in his speech, which he gave in his November Senate runoff, discussing the different merits of vampires and werewolves in combat.

The hopeful former college football star of the Republican Senate declared to the crowd: But let me tell you what I discovered. Werewolves can kill vampires. I knew? i didn’t know that.

Walker continued, “So I don’t want to be a vampire anymore. I want to be a werewolf.”

The clip was used in Warnock’s closing ad, mocking Barack Obama when he stumbled in Peach State, and became an enduring part of Walker’s political legacy.

best rap video

Utah Senator Linda Paulson, in her 80s, made headlines in September when she released a campaign video of herself rapping. Paulson was running as a Republican against an incumbent Democrat in a Salt Lake City suburb. Although she lost by 15% to her, she at least got more attention than most of the losing state legislators.

weirdest sex scandal

An ISIS bride who falls in love with a backbench member of Congress doesn’t make for a good romantic comedy.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Van Taylor, a two-term Republican from the Dallas suburbs, had a seemingly perfect pedigree for an established Republican. But despite the conservatives’ strong voting record, Taylor has faced major challenges to heresy, including voting in favor of the 2020 election and setting up a bipartisan commission to investigate on Jan. 6. I was facing

Taylor appeared to win the primary, which requires a candidate to get 50% of the support to avoid a runoff vote, but just two days ago, a far-right far-right website claimed that Taylor had dated Tania Joya. Until when she published allegations that she had an extramarital affair. She was formerly known as the widow of a prominent member of ISIS, a woman for whom British tabloids adequately featured her as the ‘Bride of ISIS’. She eventually fled ISIS and moved to Texas, where she met Taylor and an affair ensued.

An allegation fueled by one of his opponents resulted in Taylor falling just short of the 50% mark required to avoid the run-off vote, and two days later he was dropped from the race after publicly confessing the incident. Did. As a result, his House of Representatives was essentially handed over to Keith Self.

weirdest food scandal

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has long promoted a vegan diet. He claimed it had countless health benefits, including improving blindness in one eye from diabetes.

It turns out that Adams wasn’t actually vegan — he ate fish quite often. Although arguing, Adams eventually confessed and acknowledged his personal pescetarianism.

best work life balance

Democratic Congressman Kai Kahele had a very long commute from his home in Hawaii to the Capitol in Washington, D.C., but he was made much easier by simply not showing up.

The Hawaii Democratic Party’s first-term lawmakers stopped going to work in late 2021 and used proxy voting instead of going to the Capitol.as a civil beat Reports at the time showed that in the first few months of 2022, he had only cast five direct ballots as he considered his gubernatorial bid. Kahele eventually decided to run and lost with a puncture. Meanwhile, his dedication to running for gubernatorial prompted the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether he had misused public resources for the election.

The strangest corruption scandals

The late Baltimore businessman Russell “Stringer” Bell was once famously shocked that a colleague “was taking notes on a criminal conspiracy.” Rep. Marie Newman (D-Illinois) didn’t just take notes on the criminal conspiracy. She made a formal contract to do so.

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

Neumann promised her political rival a job during the 2020 primary against incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski. promised to pay him a six-figure salary as a “foreign policy adviser.” During negotiations, she also agreed to take an anti-Israeli stance on Chehade’s orders, but that language was not written into the final contract. He didn’t, so he sued her.

Neumann defended, citing the opinion of the House Counsel, that the contract was unenforceable because it was “contrary to public policy.” A settlement was eventually reached, and Chehade appeared on the electoral rolls under the title of “foreign policy adviser.” Nonetheless, the effort was referred to the Congressional Ethics Service, whose investigation found that “substantial suspicion that Congressman Neumann may have promised federal employment to key opponents for the purpose of obtaining political support.” I found a reason.

The total turmoil has sparked an ongoing investigation by the House Ethics Committee. In the end, after the two regrouped together, Newman suffered a crushing defeat to Congressman Sean Casten (D-Illinois).

Best Alliteration Fish Advocacy Award

Both in Alaska’s victory in September’s congressional special election and in the November election that followed, Mary Peltra had a lot of luck as a Democrat on the final frontier.

Pertola benefited from the state’s ranked-choice voting system and the divided Republican field, with both former reality TV star Sarah Palin and businessman Nick Vegich opposing her. rice field.

But she also had one important advantage. It’s fish. Peltola has made advocacy for Alaska’s salmon fisheries one of her cornerstones of the campaign, with her three pillars of “Fish, Family and Freedom.” It worked, and Peltra will represent the most pro-Trump constituency among Democrats in the upcoming Congress (according to the 2020 election results).